Welcome from Library curator, Scott Horn:
We are thrilled to launch our initial catalog for the Kentucky Sunshine Law Library in celebration of the fifth year anniversary of Kentucky Open Government Coalition.
By far, the largest collection in our catalog are the collected opinions and decisions of the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office since 1977. The Attorney General, long tasked with providing advisory opinions on matters of law for public officials, was given the responsibility to advise on disputes concerning our state transparency laws when the laws were enacted.
In 1992, the laws were amended. From the midpoint of 1992, decisions rendered by the AG in open records and open meetings appeals were given the "force and effect of law" if not appealed within 30 days of the date the decisions were issued. The AG has rendered nearly 50 years of open records and open meetings opinions and decisions. While they are not binding on other agencies or courts like a published appellate court opinion would be, they are considered highly persuasive, and they comprise the largest and most comprehensive resource for understanding how attorneys and courts interpret and apply the laws.
The primary source of our Attorney General Opinions and Decisions and the KRS statutes we have on the site are derived from the Lexis certified editions that are generously republished by Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org. These bulk records have gone through a lengthy process to convert them into web-ready, searchable documents with citations extracted and linked. We also perform a weekly scrape of the AG’s website for opinions and decisions as they are published.
The second largest collection in our catalog is made of Annotations from the Kentucky Revised Statutes that document important court cases interpreting the sunshine laws. These summaries provide important context in understanding specifics of things like exceptions and the appeals process, and they are regularly used by attorneys and courts to locate binding cases related to a specific statute. We are actively gathering decisions referenced in these annotations and at launch will have just under 100 court decisions republished and searchable in our library.
We include the full text of the Open Records Act and Open Meetings Act in our Library, and each statute includes a link to the KRS annotations associated with it. We will be adding a curated selection of other statutes and legal references to account for the many exceptions to the open records law that are incorporated from state and federal sources.
These resources provide a foundation that we hope to build on, guided chiefly by feedback from users, with the ultimate goal of reducing barriers and expanding the possibilities for public use of our sunshine laws. Please let us know how we can make resources that are more useful to you!